GERMAN AUTHORITIES have appealed for calm following the deaths of three people infected with a deadly strain of the E.coli bacterium.
A postmortem was carried out yesterday in Lower Saxony on the first victim of the outbreak, an 83-year-old woman admitted to hospital on May 15th with bloody diarrhoea.
The Robert Koch Institute for infectious diseases called for vigilance but not panic yesterday at what it admitted were an “unusually high” number of cases.
In the last two weeks it has registered more than 80 cases of potentially fatal haemolytic uraemic syndrome, caused by enterohemorrhagic E.coli (EHEC).
In the three fatalities yesterday the institute said it was as yet unclear if the EHEC contracted by the three victims was, in fact, the cause of death.
So far this year’s outbreak has affected mostly adult women. “At the moment we can only speculate why,” said Dr Werner Solbach of the Schleswig-Holstein university clinic in Lübeck. “Either this is because, statistically, women tend to prepare food more frequently or that we are dealing with an infected foodstuff that women eat more regularly than men.”
The EHEC bacteria is found most commonly in cattle and can find its way into the food chain either through untreated milk and unpasteurised dairy products or salad.
A young woman with symptoms of an E.coli infection died in Bremen yesterday morning, authorities confirmed. A third woman in her 80s who was infected with EHEC died on Sunday in Schleswig-Holstein.
At first the infections were concentrated in northern Germany, but by yesterday the media were reporting of up to 400 cases, spread across the country.